1. Field of the Invention
Apparatuses and methods consistent with aspects of the present invention relate to an image forming apparatus and a method of overwriting for a storage unit in an image forming apparatus, and more particularly, to an image forming apparatus which configures an overwriting option for a storage unit and carries out overwriting according to the set-up overwriting option and a method of overwriting for a storage unit in an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
An image forming apparatus, realized by a printer, a copier, a fax or a multifunctional device, includes a storage unit, such as a hard disk drive (HDD), a memory card, and a universal serial bus (USB) device, provided inside or outside thereof.
A storage unit employed in an image forming apparatus generally requires security to prepare against the leakage of or the illegal access to stored data. In particular, the storage unit has the feature that even if a specific file is deleted, only information about the file location and file attributes and the link information pointing to the space where the file is stored are deleted but the file is not deleted at the space where it is stored, and thus the data can be recovered or restored.
Accordingly, in the image forming apparatus requiring security, overwriting is carried out at the space where a data is deleted in order to provide data security. Overwriting indicates that when data are deleted from the storage unit, write-over actions are repeatedly conducted with data being written on the space where the data are deleted. Here, the more times overwriting is carried out, the more difficult it becomes to recover or restore previously stored data.
Although, the number of overwrites improves the performance of data security, such requires a lot of time and slows the processing speed of the apparatus.
Furthermore, a conventional overwriting method applies the same number of overwrites to all data in the storage unit, even when the data does not require high security, and thus, an unnecessary load is placed on apparatus processing.